“James Cameron: I want to compete with ‘Star Wars’ and Tolkien”
On the advent of the re-release of Avatar with an additional 9-minutes of new footage, the LAT’s Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher visits with James Cameron:
Apparently, there’s no such thing as a quiet little corner of the world when your name is James Cameron. “Welcome to the wind tunnel,” the 56-year-old filmmaker said as a Santa Monica sea breeze gusted through the French doors of his beachside hotel room on a recent afternoon. A hard-backed “Avatar” poster flew off a tripod stand in the corner and the filmmaker chuckled.
“Look at that, Neytiri just leaps at you the moment you walk in the room.”
Surprise attacks and second winds are fitting imagery these days. “Avatar,” the December release that stands as the highest-grossing film in history and was still showing on 500 screens as recently as mid-April, will return to theaters Friday with nine minutes of additional footage and somewhat uncertain ambitions.
The ubiquitous “Avatar” pulled in $2.4 billion in worldwide box office, which raises the question of who the target audience is for the release of “Avatar: Special Edition” — how can moviegoers miss a film if it never really went away? More than that, “Avatar” now stands as the bestselling Blu-ray ever and in its first three weeks on shelves the film sold a record-breaking 19 million units on DVD and Blu-ray.
“This is the big experiment — we’re coming out after the home-video release and relatively close on the heels of that home-video release,” writer-director Cameron said. “That’s what’s weird about this. Most people would say that ends the life cycle. But we know that there were not enough 3-D screens out there to support two big pictures when ‘Alice in Wonderland’ opened [on March 5] and then ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ they took half our screens. We know there were a lot of people at that point who wanted to see ‘Avatar’ in 3-D on a big screen. Does all that go away after the home-video release? My instinct is that people who wanted to see it on a big screen will still want to see it on a big screen.”
And about the whole Star Wars and Tolkien thing:
Cameron admires the universes created by George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry and the man who now has the two highest-grossing films of all-time (Cameron’s “Titanic” from 1997 still floats there at №2 worldwide with $1.8 billion) openly admits that he aspires to compete with his own cosmic aspirations.
“You’ve got to compete head on with these other epic works of fantasy and fiction, the Tolkiens and the ‘Star Wars’ and the ‘Star Treks,’” Cameron said. “People want a persistent alternate reality to invest themselves in and they want the detail that makes it rich and worth their time. They want to live somewhere else. Like Pandora.”
You can see Avatar in theaters — again — starting this Friday.
For more of the Hero Complex article, go here.